Trust in the divine order of things…
A familiar wisdom-teaching by now, recognized these last four years since I first heard it spoken by a woman of African descent, in Trump’s America. "How can you say that?" I remember asking her with clear exasperation. Her answer was both unsatisfying, then ultimately proverbial, such that it poured into my book, my body, my life. So today, I ask: What does trust in the divine order of things mean today, eleven days to Election Day, eleven (and more) days of awakening with dread in the pit of my stomach? [image pieces: Michael Green, Illuminated Rumi, 2006/7.]
What IS it that I dread? I suppose, at root, I dread learning that we as an American people are still a society considering an insecure, deeply wounded man who will inflict his wounds onto more and more of us until all that we held in a once-sacred-trust in one another will be completely desecrated. I dread that we will truly reap what we have sown in our personal and collective refusals to face our own pain(s), projecting it instead upon the 'other,' the powerless, the immigrant, the poor. I dread being unwilling to see my wounds mirrored to me in those who are carrying the shadow of our materialistic capitalistic hungers--so many of us unseen, unheard, unloved--as we inflict our refusals on one another and rape the earth. I dread the impending tumult–which not all of us will survive–for more of us to fearfully but faithfully learn new ways of being human together on this fragile earth. So I'll begin with me…
…at a SoulCollage retreat at Our Lady of the Pines. It has been a time of stillness, listening to and for Presence in images and silence, sitting in circle with (mostly older) women, doing our own sacred-spiritual work as best we can. From the outside, I know it could look insular, disengaged from what’s on fire in the world, navel-gazing for uncertain outcome or social purpose. Except somehow I have found freedom from the dread, for longer and longer periods of time.
The practices here also remind me how to risk more deeply into trust, even as I struggle so…
Be still and know that I am Godde (Ps 46), we might say. Be still. Try just 2 minutes, some morning/midday/evening. Time it. Breathe, task-free, for those minutes.
Be with (y/our) fear, befriending it, honoring it, calming it perhaps by letting it go into the natural world able to hold it with you. Listen for the guidance of the trees, the birds, the soil, the waters–all of which you are a part.
Do no harm (yet take no crap). Live gently in a world ungentle and violent, being willing to name your own experience of being wounded (observation, not evaluation or judgment) by what “the other’s” version is of "America."
For now, I’ve been gifted with a mantra that is keeping my fear/dread at bay: no matter what happens, the sacred work of LOVING THE UNLOVEABLE will remain.
How do we participate in that?
Be still. Befriend (your own) fear. Do no harm. Risk into trust while honoring that on some days, you simply cannot. Do your own healing work, honoring the clean pain* of it.
Surrender is the only avenue to trusting in the divine order of things, after all. Sucks, doesn't it?
*Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: clean pain is that faced and healing; dirty pain is pain refused and projected.
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